Common Business-Centric Metrics Systems

Often metrics will be paired with organizational goals or directives in one of the more popular “business-centric” formats like KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). While KPIs and OKRs are often developed and maintained at the more strategic levels of the company (Director or VP levels and above), they will affect an individual team in two ways; they will either “trickle down” or “cascade down” to your team, or individual teams will sometimes be asked to create their own OKRs or KPIs.

“Trickle down” metrics will often be coached in very broad terms, using whole-application or whole-system or whole-company kinds of numbers, like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or mobile app user ratings. These will often require some interpretation and/or segmentation by you and your manager, to determine how your team affects those aggregate scores. As a general rule, the closer your team is to the user—for example, a team building the mobile app the users download and interact with, as opposed to the team building microservices behind the HTTP API that the mobile app invokes—the more likely your team will be held directly accountable to those user-facing scores. Part of your manager’s job will then be to make sure that your team isn’t held accountable for parts of the code or system that you can’t control, while yours is to ensure that your team is aware of the accountability to the parts of the code/system that you can control, and to set performance expectations to reinforce that.

Creating your own KPIs or OKRs is beyond the scope of this course; numerous management books discuss these, but it’s far likelier that if your company has adopted one of these systems, they’ll have resources for you to draw upon to learn how to use them. (If not, ask your HR partner, because your peers are probably wondering the same thing.) Just make sure you understand how your team interacts with those metrics, and what the larger goal of the metrics are as a whole.